How To Undo Spoken Mistakes in NaturallySpeaking

Making a verbal mistake or blooper that you need to undo is easy to do with speech input in NaturallySpeaking. You call across the office to someone or mutter something sarcastic, and NaturallySpeaking dutifully types it.

If you make a mistake verbally, however, you can also undo it verbally. (On the other hand, if NaturallySpeaking, not you, makes the mistake, you should correct NaturallySpeaking, not undo the mistake. That requires a different process.)

The two verbal commands that are most useful for undoing your bloopers are these:

Scratch That

Undo That

The NaturallySpeaking command for undoing your bloopers is Scratch That. To use the command, you must not have edited anything with your mouse and keyboard since you last spoke. The command will undo up to ten consecutive utterances, up to the last break in your dictation (where you did some keyboard work).

Alternatively, you can say, Undo That (or Undo Last Action). That verbal command is the equivalent to the undo command, so it works not only on dictated text, but also on anything that you could normally undo. For example, if you had just applied bullet-style formatting, you could undo that formatting.

Of course, nothing says that you have to use NaturallySpeaking to undo your bloopers. You can use your keyboard or mouse (press Ctrl+Z, for example, press the Backspace key, or select the text and press the Delete key) just as you would if you had typed the mistake.

If physically pressing the Backspace or Delete key is not an option for you, here are two verbal commands you can use for the same purpose:

Backspace (or Press Backspace)

Delete (or Press Delete)

You can backspace or delete several characters by saying, Backspace 7 to backspace seven characters, for example, or Delete 8 characters to delete eight characters to the right of the typing cursor. The Backspace command can be more reliable. (Because the word delete is more commonly written out in text than the word backspace, NaturallySpeaking sometimes errs on the side of writing out delete rather than doing the Delete command.)